Robert Horton, Writing About Film

Follow Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

About This Site

The Crop Duster has two goals. One is to organize links to my critical work: reviews written for The Herald (Everett, Washington) and Seattle Weekly; and public appearances and TV jobs. Selected past work for Film Comment and elsewhere is also linkified. You may also link to my website of 1980s reviews and learn more about my book on Frankenstein and my graphic novel, ROTTEN.

The second goal is to keep a daily record of films watched, annotated with brisk, brief comments. It's a slightly more advanced version of the movie list I kept, in Flair pen, thumbtacked next to my bed when I was twelve.

Paul Williams Still Alive. “Let’s put it this way: George Gershwin and Burt Bacharach never played a simian in a Planet of the Apes movie.”

On KUOW’s “Weekday,” I talk with Steve Scher about the shadow of magic realism falling across To Rome with Love and Beasts of the Southern Wild; the segment is archived here, with the movie bit kicking in at the 16:30 mark.

Don’t forget to partake of another Framing Pictures discussion, down at the Northwest Film Forum at 5 p.m. today (Friday). I can’t make this one, but co-founders Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy will be joined by notorious wit Bruce Reid to sift through various cinematic subjects, likely to include a revival of Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion, the return of Buster Keaton, the extended DVD cut of Kenneth Lonergan’s remarkable Margaret, and some thoughts on the recent death of Andrew Sarris, the most influential film critic of his generation. Meantime, the June edition of Framing Pictures is being broadcast by the Seattle Channel in upcoming days (schedule here), and available online here.

At What a Feeling!, the week of bodacious Eighties reviews rounds off with a look back at James B. Harris’s Cop and Barry Levinson’s Rain Man.